[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks for that great post, Bill (#224, above). Whatever it is in Kate’s voice, in an algebraic equation, or for that matter in the Kaaba or the ocean that moves people to the core—that’s beauty. I think that is the gist of what you say there at the end of the post. Everybody knows it when they’ve experienced it, and everybody wants that experience, however we define it or can’t define it, wherever we find it or don’t find it. It isn’t surprising that it is so hard to talk about or define—it would be surprising if it were otherwise, with anything that has such scope and power.

A brief disagreement with your characterization of Christian theories of beauty: Pseudo-Dionysius. I can’t do better than to say, as he does, that whatever beauty is, it transcends any particular manifestation of it—since it is experienced in so many ways and forms. Like being. The fact that I can say “I am,” and that it is true, doesn’t make it any less true when someone else says it. The “I” transcends the individual who says it. Megalomania (i.e., everyday delusion enjoyed by us all) is forgetting this. Beauty too is above and beyond its particular form. If this were not so, it is hard to see how it could be transformative in the way you describe. Beauty’s un-pin-down-able-ness, which you and Ed and Andrew M. refer to, comes from its not being a thing among other things. It can’t be possessed or googled, figured out or embalmed. The experience of it takes us out of the isolation of me-in-here subjectivity, into direct communion, to the I-am-no-longer-I, as Juan Ramón Jiménez puts it: Yo no soy yo. I am not I. Soy este / que va a mi lado sin yo verlo, / que, a veces, voy a ver, / y que, a veces olvido. “I am this one who goes along by my side without my seeing him, who at times I am on the verge of seeing, and who at times I forget.” The experience of beauty is the remembering, so whatever beauty is “in itself,” it has got to be something akin to that not-I or Other which is who we really are.

That’s what I understand by the curious phrase “Beauty is a transcendental.”

Someone, I think it was the sculptor Eric Gill, said that the last thing an artist should aim for is beauty. And he was a follower of Maritain. Gill’s point was, just do the work and do it well, and the beauty will come—or it won’t.

[Rick Mullin]

All art is a matter of objective subjectivity. And Keats nailed beauty. It's silly to go into such long and tortured definitions of these things. "It's Academic".

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by Rick Mullin

All art is a matter of objective subjectivity. And Keats nailed beauty. It's silly to go into such long and tortured definitions of these things. "It's Academic".

Well then Rick, it’s a silliness that has resulted in such secondary sillinesses as Chartres Cathedral, the Enneads of Plotinus, and the Florentine Renaissance. For non-European sillinessess how about Avicenna or al-Ghazzali, who based much of their thinking on Plotinus along with key passages from the Quran. All light years beyond Keats, who is great but fragmentary along with the time he lived in. Name me one artistic production of the present that approaches the beauty of Alhambra. And yet a long, rich culture of discourse on the nature of beauty had a lot to do with the preparation that it took to create such a masterpiece.

I can see the sense in choosing not to talk about it, or in thinking that talking about it inhibits creative practice in the present. Writing a poem is a lot more fun. But to dismiss talking about it as a sterile academic exercise is to ignore the facts: vast edifices of artistic realization far beyond anything possible in our own time, inspired and sustained by the sort of talk you’re writing off as “silly.”

“Objective subjectivity,” and that’s that. If only the great aesthetic theorists of the past had known it was so simple. Jeesh.

[Michael Cantor]

I'm with Rick.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

If only the great aesthetic theorists of the past had known it was so simple. Jeesh.

Exactly. In an odd way, some responses remind me of that old joke about the guy who is born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Then he argues that any discussion of the finer points of batting is just silly.

Newton had a better view: we only see a little further because we have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of giants.

But the whole know-nothing position is curiously American. We even see it in our politics. One side says "I built my business all by myself." And when the other side says "You didn't build the roads to transport your goods, you didn't build the network you use to communicate, you didn't build the schools that train the people who work with you," they get really, really mad. And say unpleasant things.

Never mind that Keats' 'beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that's the end of it,' is just silly. If A *is* A, it can't also be B, unless of course everything is one, in which case it makes no sense to name A and B. Never mind that at best it's an undergraduate's view of Plato (if only Keats had lived longer!). It's especially ironic when formalists repeat it, since Plato believed beauty is form enough, and that 'the form F *is* F.' And that only beauty is *both* a form and a sensory experience.

You can tell I'm a little frustrated. I don't understand how we can draw such clear lines between learning, knowing, and doing. It seems to me they are interwoven and interrelated. I don't fully agree with Maritain's definition that art is "a virtue of the practical intellect that aims at making," but when he says 'since art is a virtue that aims at making, to be an artist requires aiming at making beautiful things,' I'm right on board. Maybe that's because I believe virtue can be taught, discussed, learned, and practiced.

Maybe that's the theological difference here. If one believes, with the Spartans, that virtue can not be taught, that it (like artistic ability) either exists or doesn't exist within the individual, then every discussion of the subject would be pointless. On the other hand, that would also mean workshops are completely pointless.

Best,

Bill

[Allen Tice]

If A *is* A, it can't also be B, unless of course everything is one, in which case it makes no sense to name A and B.

Let's tighten up here :
If A *is* A, it can't also be B, unless of course they map exactly onto each other, in which case it makes no sense to name separately A and B --- except if A and B are terms from different realms of discourse --- which "truth" and "beauty" (as of a summer's day) certainly are.

[RCL]

Doesn't Plato's Good entail Truth and Beauty? (Logos and Cosmos?)

[ross hamilton hill]

I would say most modern philosophers shy away from defining truth, beauty or other broad abstracts like freedom, love etc. Wittgenstein famously said it's better to shut up than spin a lot of words that simply end up a tower of Babel.
Best, philosophically, to concentrate on things words can handle.
And as for the Allambra, the world is full of modern wonders, I am typing on one right now.

[Ed Shacklee]

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door,
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore;
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

- William Blake, "The Garden of Love"

[Allen Tice]

Not to get gnarly, but I'd develop Rick's "objective subjectivity" to "interestingly realized objective subjectivity" or "attractively realized objective subjectivity".

(Plato, Clamato! Xenophon (with all his faults) was ten times as well-grounded in reality.)